Three decades after the
collapse of communism in eastern Europe, there's now unease about liberal
capitalism. It's benefitting the global Right more than leftists.
Today, it’s commonplace to
emphasize the “miraculous” nature of the fall of the Berlin Wall, 30 years ago,
this month. Back then, it was like a dream come true, something unimaginable
even a couple of months earlier. Soon after, the Communist regimes collapsed
like a house of cards.
Who, before then, in Poland
could have imagined free elections with Lech Walesa as president? However, one
should add that an even greater “miracle” happened only a couple of years
later: the return of the ex-Communists to power through free democratic
elections. Walesa was soon totally marginalized and much less popular than
General Wojciech Jaruzelski who, a decade and a half earlier, crushed
Solidarity with the military coup d’etat.
At this point, one usually
mentions “capitalist realism”: East Europeans simply didn’t possess a realistic
image of capitalism. They were full of immature utopian expectations. The
morning after the enthusiasm of the drunken days of victory, people had to
sober up and undergo a painful process of learning the rules of the new
reality, i.e., the price one has to pay for political and economic freedom. It
was, effectively, as if the European Left had to die twice: first as the
“totalitarian” Communist Left, then as the moderate democratic Left which,
since the 1990's, has been gradually losing ground.
However, things are a little
bit more complex. When people protested against the Communist regimes in
Eastern Europe, what the large majority had in mind was not capitalism. They
wanted social security, solidarity, and justice. They wanted the freedom to
live their own lives outside state control and to come together and talk as
they pleased. They wanted a life of simple honesty and sincerity, liberated
from primitive ideological indoctrination and the prevailing cynical hypocrisy.
In short, the vague ideals
that inspired the protesters were to a large extent taken from the socialist
ideology itself. And, as we learned from Freud, what is repressed often returns
in a distorted form – in our case, what was repressed from the dissident
imaginary returned in the guise of rightist populism.
No wonder how, after a long
time of preaching openness and globalization, developed countries are now into
building new walls, because the new formula is free movement of commodities
instead of free movement of people.
In his interpretation of the
fall of East European Communism, Jurgen Habermas proved to be the ultimate Left
Fukuyamaist, silently accepting that the existing liberal-democratic order is
the best possible, and that, while we should strive to make it more just, etc.,
we should not challenge its basic premises.
This is why he welcomed
precisely what many leftists saw as the big deficiency of the anti-Communist
protests in Eastern Europe: the fact that these protests were not motivated by
any new visions of the post-Communist future – as he put it, the central and
eastern European revolutions were just what he called “rectifying” or “catch-up”
revolutions: their aim was to enable central and eastern European societies to
gain what the western Europeans already possessed. In other words, to return to
European “normality.”
However, the likes of the
Yellow Vests, and other similar protests, are definitely NOT catch-up
movements. They embody the weird reversal that characterizes today’s global
situation. The old antagonism between “ordinary people” and the
financial-capitalist elites is back with a vengeance, with “ordinary people”
exploding in protest against elites accused of being blind to their suffering
and demands.
Yet, what is new is that the
populist Right proved to be much more adept in channeling these explosions in its
direction than the Left. Alain Badiou was thus fully justified to say apropos
the Yellow Vests: “Tout ce qui bouge n'est pas rouge” – “all that moves
(creates unrest) is not red.”
Today’s populist Right
participates in the long tradition of popular protests which were predominantly
leftist. Some revolts today (Catalonia, Hong Kong) can even be considered a
case of what is sometimes called the revolts of the rich – remember that
Catalonia is, together with Basque country, the richest part of Spain and that
Hong Kong is per capita much wealthier than China. There is no solidarity with
the exploited and poor of China in Hong Kong, no demand for freedoms for all in
China, just the demand to retain one’s privileged position.
Here, then, is the paradox we
have to confront: the populist disappointment at liberal democracy is the proof
that 1989 and 1990 was not just a catch-up revolution. Instead, it was about
something more than achieving liberal-capitalist 'normality'. Freud spoke about
Das Unbehagen in der Kultur ( the discontent/unease in culture); today, 30
years after the fall of the Wall, the ongoing new wave of protests bears
witness of a kind of Unbehagen in liberal capitalism, and the key question is:
who will articulate this discontent? Will it be left to nationalist populists
to exploit it? Therein resides the big conundrum facing the Left.
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